Technology: Are there any civilization-transforming breakthroughs on the horizon? Would we know?

[Hyperelastic]

I’m strictly in the physical sciences, so it pains me a little to say this, but it seems like applications of genetics will be the next big breakthrough. The theory is well-understood and you have a lot of bright people working on applications with little glimmers of success here and there. All of a sudden there will be a bunch of technical leaps that allow genes to be sequenced, their expression understood, and rearranged at will to enable all kinds of medical interventions. That’s my speculation anyway.

[Kolga]

I heard a story on Colorado Public Radio a while back that a team at CSU is working on solar “dots” - solar panels that are tiny and round and WAY more efficient than the current panels we have. I think something like that, involving cleaner and more abundant energy, would be a pretty society-changing breakthrough.

[thelabdude]

@Chessic_Sense

Here’s a new technique to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which is so costly that it’s a (the?) major factor holding back fuel cells. If the price comes down, then we won’t need oil anymore.

Yawn. That is only a improvement to one link. No solution to the vast expense of the capital cost of renewable electricity. Even the atomic power plants needed to produce hydrogen in quantity would be very expensive. With the problems of storage and transportation yet to be solved, I see little future in hydrogen.

[Koxinga]

@Hyperelastic

I’m strictly in the physical sciences, so it pains me a little to say this, but it seems like applications of genetics will be the next big breakthrough. The theory is well-understood and you have a lot of bright people working on applications with little glimmers of success here and there. All of a sudden there will be a bunch of technical leaps that allow genes to be sequenced, their expression understood, and rearranged at will to enable all kinds of medical interventions. That’s my speculation anyway.

That brings an interesting article to mind:
MSNBC: Hobbyists try genetic engineering at home. If one of these self-styled “biohackers” uncovers a cure for cancer, or OTOH inadvertently unleashes an unstoppable pandemic, I guess that’d be civilization changing right there.

[Wesley_Clark]

Robotics. My understanding is we are about 20-50 years away from bipedal robots who can do most of the work of humans. That should be pretty life changing.

Also more advanced AI and software that can help us problem solve better. Augmented reality is one example. But another is the ability to communicate with a program that can mine endless Exabytes of data. The Jeopardy computer is being designed as a medical device that can comprehend your question then scan endless libraries of medical journals to give you advice. Once those are everywhere, and you can get amazing insights at will for various fields (medicine, architecture, engineering) that will be life altering above what the internet offered.

3-d fabrication.

Aging will dramatically change IMO. Robotics to help people be more mobile. We are learning to make new organs out of stem cells to replace hearts, kidneys, etc. Maybe life expectancy will actually start growing on the tail end, rather than just going up because we decrease childhood mortality.

I’m sure there are more.

[DorkVader]

@Chronos

Quoth Mijin:Don’t hold your breath. Those microwave metamaterials fall into a category technically referred to as “really friggin’ cool”, but they rely on structures orders of magnitude smaller than the wavelength of light they’re using. But when you go to visible light, the wavelengths are much smaller, such that atoms might even be too big to make those structures out of. And we don’t know how to make anything out of anything but atoms.

check this out. Now to be able to make this stuff and have it work and be useful on a regular human scale, ummm, hm, how do we know they haven’t already?

[Fubaya]

@Mijin

I find it surprising that someone would think this. I can think of hundreds of ways life could be better, and my imagination has probably been limited by living in the 20-21st centuries for 32 years.

I didn’t mean nothing new is going to come around, just that we have a good start on nearly everything so it’s hard to think of something that is entirely new. Robots, for example, are an improvement on, well, robots. A cure for cancer would be an improvement in medicine, AI an improvement in software. Antigravity, now that would be something new.

[Wesley_Clark]

@Koxinga

I guess the last real breakthrough was the World Wide Web about fifteen years ago. Aside from that big exception, though, everything seems to be incremental improvements to what we do already. Watch TV, fly on a commercial airline, drive a car. Again, with the exception of the Internet I don’t think there’s anything that someone from the 1960s would look and say, “Holy Futurama, Batman, I’ve never done anything like that. Neato!”

As for whether we’d know: William Gibson and earlier sci-fi authors anticipated the Internet, sorta. Anything plausibly earth-shaking in science fiction these days?

What is the definition of civilization transforming? The cell phone is civilization transforming in rural parts of the developing world, and is as transformative as the internet. But to us in the west it is just an improvement over land lines. Low cost personal solar power will be transformative in the developing world (cheap, off grid energy), but in the developed world it’ll just be another form of energy.

Ray Kurzweil also predicted the internet in the 1980s. He looked at exponential growth in servers in the 80s and predicted by the early/mid 90s the growth would lead to a national and worldwide. However most of his predictions for 1999 and 2009 were extremely optimistic. They are happening, but not on the scale he foresaw. But that isn’t a long term prediction, that is just looking at current trends and extrapolating them.

[Vihaga]

@Koxinga

I guess the last real breakthrough was the World Wide Web about fifteen years ago. Aside from that big exception, though, everything seems to be incremental improvements to what we do already. .. Anything plausibly earth-shaking in science fiction these days?

That we even expect another civilization-changing breakthrough such a short time after our last one is encouraging.
I know several posters have disagreed, but my smartphone (much because it has GPS) has changed my life quite a lot.

[Blake]

@Koxinga

But surely you can look at society and get some idea of what new categories of technology will suddenly* become an absolute must-have.

Well if it is possible, nobody has ever managed to do it. Maybe that will be the next breakthrough: accurate futurism.

The Roman Empire stagnated technologically because there was so much cheap slave labor, who needs a whistling tabletop steam whirligig? – But . . . what if slavery is eliminated, what needs does that create in society? Some sort of . . . mechanical devices to take the place of Frankish labor? Hmmm . . .

Or we need to outsource to areas of high population density such as Asia and Africa. So we will need much better shipbuilding and navigation technology to transport the goods.

Or we will need to replace the slaves with paid immigrant labourers. So we will need to tweak our economic system. Obviously we will need separate currencies for foreign workers and citizens, with the labourers being able to redeem their savings in gold only after repatriation.

Or perhaps we need to improve animal traction to increase the labour that each person can achieve. If we could come up with some sort of a harness or collar that would enable a mule to pull a plough, and we could breed really big mules, that would make up for the labour shortfall all by itself.

I could keep going all night with scenarios that would have been far more plausible to the Romans than the idea of machinery. They would have thought you were crazy if you had speculated on machines doing work.

Likewise, thanks to Dr. Pasteur we suddenly have children surviving beyond their fifth year in inordinate numbers and the population is skyrocketing. We simply have more people popping up than ever before, their farms can’t support them and they’re congregating in the cities. So many people simply cannot live within such a confined space. We need a way to efficiently convey them in and out of the city so that they may live outside its confines and yet still be able to work in their offices during the day. And there are only so many horses. We need some sort of . . . mechanical carriage? Hmmm . . .

No, that’s the last thing we need. Rich people already have perfectly functional carriages, and there is no way that all these poor people could afford to by a horse-drawn carriage, much less a mechanical one.

What we need is more efficient mass transport and high density housing close to the work sites.

Or we need to distribute manufacturing throughout the countryside, connected by a series of canals.

And so on and so forth.

Once again, the solution you prepared was never even remotely conceivable to the people of the day. The idea that factory worker could afford a carriage and somewhere to house it was simply unthinkable during the Industrial Revolution. Not just implausible, but every bit as ludicrous as flying to the moon.

And when I say “suddenly,” I’m not talking about one wild-haired inventor in a basement: within the space of 20 years aeroplanes went from proof of concept to never-before-seen applications in peace and war. Likewise with automobiles. In a historical context, surely that’s sudden enough?

But they didn’t. People had been working on powered flight for 100 years at least. And 20 years from the time of the first powered flight was 1923, and aircraft were still mostly a curiosity. Likewise, the first production automobiles were sold in 1885. By 1905 they were very much a rarity and an oddity with no serious military or peacetime applications.